[Note: This post is a condensed version of an essay I wrote at George Mason University, which I will be discussing at the Master's Colloquium tomorrow. Enjoy.]
In the aftermath of Nat Turner's slave rebellion of August 1831, the Virginia and Maryland state legislatures both debated and considered ending slavery. As recounted in books such as William W. Freehling's Road to Disunion: Separatists at Bay, a diverse set of state representatives denounced slavery for a variety of reasons before ultimately being outvoted. The crisis of a violent insurrection had prompted an unprecedented critique of the status quo in the Chesapeake region that had fathered American slavery centuries earlier.
In Washington, D.C., a brief but similar debate took place. In D.C., as in Virginia and Maryland, congressmen discussed their disapproval of slavery and considered proposals to end it. Unlike in Richmond and Annapolis, the discussion in Washington, D.C. was unique in one respect. It revealed an emerging gulf between anti-slavery legislators and the grassroots activists who had come to be known as abolitionists.
The brief debate in the U.S. Capitol took place as a result of a petition drive coordinated by Benjamin Lundy, publisher of the monthly anti-slavery newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation. As a member of the American Convention of Abolition Societies, Lundy had volunteered to coordinate an anti-slavery petition drive. His goal was to lobby Congress to end slavery in Washington, where Article I of the U.S. Constitution permitted Congress "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever."
In 1828, Lundy gathered 1,100 signatures from Washington, D.C. residents opposing slavery. When this so-called "monster petition" proved unsuccessful, Lundy changed tactics. “Members of Congress will feel themselves under less obligation to answer our prayers, than those of their immediate constituents [emphasis in original],” he wrote in the April 1831 edition of the Genius. Lundy, with a wide base of subscribers and allies in far-off abolition societies, took the petition drive nationwide. As part of this continuing effort, Lundy met with Representative-Elect and former president John Quincy Adams to ensure that a petition would be read in the opening days of the next Congressional session.
Lundy's views, and those of his petitioners, were quite similar to those that had been expressed by the anti-slavery legislators in Virginia and Maryland. Both groups had cited progressive economic development, public safety, and Enlightenment ideals of freedoms and rights ("republican ideals," in the words of one petition) in their critiques of slavery. Both groups also proposed similar ways of ending slavery, including gradual abolition and compensation for slaveowners. Both groups also considered plans to send (or even exile) freed slaves to African colonies. (Only later in the 1830s did the abolitionist movement begin to turn against colonization schemes.)
Despite these many shared values and overlapping ideas, the abolitionist petition movement did not win over anti-slavery Congressmen in 1831. John Quincy Adams himself, despite his anti-slavery sentiment, declined to endorse the very proposal that he had introduced into the floor of Congress. The Chairman of the House Committee on the District of Columbia, Philip Doddridge, reacted similarly. In Virginia, Doddridge was an executive member of the anti-slavery American Colonization Society; in the state's last constitutional convention, he had blasted slaveowner's disproportionate share of power. As Chairman of the House Committee, however, he felt uncomfortable acting on slavery in Washington, D.C. and declined to pursue any emancipation scheme there.
Benjamin Lundy's scheme in April 1831 to gather Congressmen's "immediate constituents" nationwide further propelled the insurgent abolitionist movement. By rallying petitioners from points as disparate as Tennessee, New Jersey, and Vermont, Lundy was creating a national movement. Rather than gaining traction in the halls of Congress, this nationwide activism actually revealed a chasm between abolitionists and anti-slavery legislators. Abolitionists were increasingly radical and wanted to use Washington, D.C. as a proxy war for slavery nationwide. In contrast, congressmen like Adams and Doddridge were rooted in voluntarist principles and uncomfortable asserting their anti-slavery views outside of their home state.
Throughout the 1830s, as recounted in William Lee Miller's epic Arguing About Slavery, the petition drive would intensify. The debate over slavery would gradually polarize Americans and leave little room for the more thoughtful debates that had occurred in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. in 1831-32. John Quincy Adams would soon warm up to these petitions and become a critical ally to abolitionists. Benjamin Lundy would fade from the abolitionist movement, while his protoge William Lloyd Garrison became its principle leader.
Emancipation finally arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1862 - 150 years ago this past week.
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This episode was short, local, and soon eclipsed by a radicalization of pro- and anti-slavery forces. What can we draw from it in the big picture? The debates between anti-slavery legislators and abolitionists show us both the extent, and limits, of anti-slavery thought in the early 19th Century. At least in the mid-Atlantic region, a surprisingly large number of white men despised slavery. (Of course, this rarely was due to a sense of racial justice or equality.) Nonetheless, few of them were willing to do act affirmatively to end slavery. Even when a fierce critic of slavery like Philip Doddridge had a chance to help emancipate thousands of slaves in Washington, he declined the opportunity.
The events of 1831-32 also prompt an important question that is not adequately addressed in the historiography: what is an abolitionist? Was John Quincy Adams? Philip Doddridge, who owned one slave? I would say no, but that is based on my own judgment. I have done a fair bit of lumping and splitting here, dividing a number of historical actors into two distinct categories. This takes a rhetorical leap of faith - I haven't bothered to define my terms. That would be quite a bit easier if a major historian were to attack this question head-on.
